On Friday I had the pleasure of meeting one of the most exciting ventures in the travel and Internet market - and surely to be one of the hottest properties this year!!

I am talking about Arnna Alexander and www.oe.tv - a video sharing website for travellers. While she declares herself a Kiwi, Arnna has spent a large amount of her life growing up in Sweden (her mother is Swedish) and most of the last 5 years in London - although a lot of last year was spent travelling the world with the Pro Triathlon Circuit where she honed her skills in online web streaming (check out www.triathlon.org).

While video sharing sites are not new, www.oe.tv really is something special. It is appeals directly to a target niche market and I believe will grow to be very prolific in this market. Arnna cited an example of one video that she says was posted on both You Tube and OE.TV simultaneously - while it received 7 viewings on You Tube it received 440 viewings in the same period on OE.TV. Clearly, I can see the value to travel businesses that such marketing opportunities afford; and the onto guys are already there - apparently there is a great competition about to be launched involving Stray, New Zealand comedian presenter Mickey Havoc and radio station B FM.

Arnna’s background is TV and film production and this is the side of the business that she clearly relishes; I caught her on her return from a trip to Japan where she had created a series of Travelogues. She took pride in showing me how easy it was to create a video and uploaded (something she had done in a matter of minutes at the airport in Japan using wireless).

That’s one of the big selling pitches of OE.TV it offers slick well oiled technology. In particular online encoding, which means that you can post your video in most formats and the site does the behind the scenes work to convert it for web streaming. All the hosting and streaming are managed out of the US and all the web design has been handled out of Sweden (and a great looking site it is too). The staggering thing is that the whole project has taken less than a year to get off the ground and the actual site has only been live for about 6 weeks - certainly a lot of interest has been generated in such a short time (I was pointed to check it out by 3 people alone).

This might be a startup, but it is by no means a small operation - I met a handful of staff and there is a marketing team based in the UK also. In fact, Arnna plans to spend only the next 6 months in NZ before heading back to London to give things a big push there (back-to-back winters argh!). I did not quite understand the investment structure but Arnna explained that they were in the process of attracting investment - “but only the right investment; (they) don’t need the cash but rather strongly motivated partners to make this a success”.

Arnna describes the venture as My Space meets Lonely Planet. As well as user generated content the team are producing their own series of short 6 minute or so travel stories - many of them involving well known celebrities. In fact, this is where I think OE.TV strategy is very clever. Using her contacts from film and TV Arnna has attracted a host of stars such as ex Shortland Streeters Paul Ellis, Leighton Cardno and Paul Reid. In fact, Arnna was in Japan with Adam Sinclair (the Scottish guy in the Trainspotting sequel). I have watched quite a few of them and some of them are really funny. Check out the Monkeys & Shenanigans series.

From a users point of view the site comes with much of the My Space features, the ability to set up your own profile page, “have friends” who can comment on your page, share photos, travel blogs etc., but very nicely presented. It is already along way ahead of anything You Tube has to offer - and I would seriously promoted it to any traveller to share their videos (whether they be public or private). There are lots of other cool features like the ability to build up travel chapters combined with a blog and a good photo sharing page, which is being enhanced with tagging features.

So, what’s next for OE.TV? Well watch this space as I hope to find out a lot more about the technology and are already promoting to many that they should be active on the site. I will watch and report this with anticipation. There are a series of videos due out soon featuring two well known celebrities, one NZ and one English, traveling around NZ (but we can’t know who yet). Plus, I am really interested in the coming functionality that has users tagging other users videos and images - the application and success of this will be very interesting to us in Web 2.0 geek world.

Good luck Arnna and crew I really look forward to catching up again in a month or so for an update.

Thanks for all the feedback on the months’ article - it makes it worthwhile producing when you get such positive response.

I can’t emphasise enough the need to improve travel websites. Without a doubt as web marketing becomes increasingly competitive and marketers increasingly savy, websites ease of use will become a way to stand out from the crowd. Statistics vary from 27% to 66% of users abandon their shopping carts (US Online) - that is, they have built up products to purchase and then don’t at the last minute - to 50% of potential sales are lost from a site because people can’t find stuff (Juipiter Research)! Quite simply, websites have to to improve usability!

Similarily, thorough planning and strategy are paramount. No matter how much of an expert you think you are - your not! I took on a project last Christmas that is still ongoing! The client declined to go through a strategy phase saying “we have been to the seminars and understand all this Web 2.0 stuff and know what we want”. 4 months later the site is still too’ing and fro’ing with the designers as the client wasn’t clear in their own head of their direction and strategy.

Planning saves money! It is 40 - 100 times more expensive to make changes to your sites functionality and look and feel in the production and maintenance phase than in the design phase!!

I have come across an interest fact being reported on an application called Web CEO. I use Web CEO to do analysis of a website for onsite optimisation amongst other things. It is a good tool - and although you can do everything it does manually it simply speeds everything up. The interesting fact is that according to Web CEO top ranked websites usually have a word count of no more than 1,320 words and generally no less than 113 words.

With this sort of certainty I thought it appropriate that I do some greater research and I found a few more similar stats. Voila Fair says that your content should be between 300 and 600 words; but the most interesting one I found was a company called Internet Marketing Solution gives a very accurate breakdown by Search Engine:

• Google US between 521 and 715
• Yahoo US between 559 and 962
• MSN US between 506 and 711
• Google Oz between 637 and 792
• Yahoo Oz between 617 and 1,175
• MSN Oz between 448 and 601

So I guess the answer is somewhere between 500 and 700 words per page should see you in the right area.

It is important to add to this that while word count is an interesting consideration, it is your keywords that count and in this regard keyword density should be evaluated. That is, your selected keyword phrases should appear in your page content between 3 and 6% and as a percentage of your overall page construction including HTML code as about 4.5%. Your keyword density (the number of times your keywords appear relative to content) should rise to as much as 7% on internal pages, which are obviously optimised with greater specificity for your keywords to match content.

So, there we have some interesting tips based on word count. An few important provisos, and I stress again IMPORTANT, first don’t specifically right your content for search engines - search engines don’t book bed nights or go on tours, people do. Write your content with the purpose of attracting the right customers and converting them to sales (keeping in mind these great little helpers - also see my earlier posts regarding The Art of Writing Web Content). Secondly, on-site optimisation (which includes amongst many other factors the number of times your keywords appear, how many are bold, how many make up anchor text links etc) is only a small part of Search Engine Optimistation and Internet marketing - while it is important, there is so much more to the whole process. You can get a bit of a better feel for it in my February article which introduced a few more aspects of SEO.

Those that know me will know that I pretend to kite surf. I actually love the idea of it and while I can go back and forward ok and actually feel quite comfortable flying the kite it scares the b’jesus out of me; that at any point I am going to dragged up the beach and impailed in a tree - if not under a passing bus!

Nonetheless, thanks to Bruce Thurlow of Adventure Tours and Oz Experience fame I have discovered that kite surfing is in fact a right of passage for becoming an Internet Guru. Last week at ATEC (see these posts) Bruce handed me an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (Tuesday April 17th) about Larry Page, Google, and Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia. As the story transpires:

Last summer, Sir Richard Branson invited a few of his friends - (…) Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy and Rosalynne Carter, Peter Gabriel, Google co-founder Larry Page {and Jimbo Wales, creator of Wikipedia} - to be his guests a Necker, his private island in The Caribbean, for a few days. (..) Now when Wales talks about that heady week, he’s quick to mention how he beat Page in a sailing race around the island. But Sir Richard raised the stakes when he invited the Internet boys to join him in a more thrilling and dangerous pursuit: kite surfing.

As it goes Page is an experienced kite surfer and made no time in getting his back on Wales for the sailing drubbing. In fact, Wales was left grovelling in water going through the lessons of body dragging etc. As it happened the weather turned bad and Wales never actually got up going much to the delight of Page and bitter envy of Wales.

Although no correlation, since then Wales has been promoting his new venture Wikia Search, which is to be a revolutionary mass collaboration search engine while completely bagging Google as producing “too much spam and useless crap”.

So, no love lost then boys. Good news is that when I go to hang out with Sir Richard this summer I will be able to fly with the big boys!

Also, check this video out - a guy gets dragged into the air about 300 meters up by his Kite for 45 seconds!

A different theme this month, moving away from Internet marketing for a break and focussing on some important points in undertaking a successful website redesign project.

2007 is the year in which most tourism companies will undertake their first major capital intensive overhaul of their websites. This paper examines some of the critical factors to justifying the investment and ensuring measurable success. In this document I emphasise the importance of focusing first on the basics of web design, and the need for concrete measurables, including a simple return on investment model example.

Good luck!

Successful Website Redesign

Well, it was a great conference - in a great place. I stayed in Salt, near Kingscliffe and it was hard to convince me that work was more important than the fabulous pool and beach!

The Backpacker Day was excellent especially the “real” backpackers panel. We all loved the pretty Swedish girl who exclaimed that she came to Australia for a 5 week holiday with about $20,000 to spend - as it transpires she has stayed on for three months already!! One of the things I wondered about the backpackers themselves were their ultimate relevancy. All were selected from the Arts Factory Village Backpackers (which I have to say is a fantastic environment) and by their nature were perhaps a little more alternative than many of the travellers some of these commercial operators would be targetting. The lovely Canadian girl explained to us that “75% of backpackers were hippies”. I wonder if the backpacker panel had been chosen from the likes of Wake Up in Sydney or one of the base or Nomads hostels we might have heard significantly different results.

I was pleased that following my presentation they all proclaimed to be keeping blogs or social site - one in fact was managing three such sites (MySpace, MSN Spaces and Facebook).

I heard lots of interesting stuff over the subsequent days and look forward to seeing things come to fruition over the next months. Congratulations to the imminent addition to Meg from Nomads family, and their new coming Sydney hostel as well. Rick Schindler also let me know how well his Pub Tours and Booze Cruises are doing in Sydney - amazing!

Thanks to Belinda and her team for the support, and Mike at the Word for his most amusing MC role for the day.

I am today flying to Gold Coast and Tweed Heads for the ATEC conference. ATEC is Australia’s main tourism promotion body and the annual symposium attracts over 500 delegates.

As part of this year there will be a breakout day for the backpacker industry, which is being held in Byron Bay. I am speaking on Internet Marketing and Web 2.0 along with presentations by Martin Kelly of Travel.biz and Paul Fisher of Total Travel.

Looking forward to catching up with old friends also, I will post any exciting happenings I discover during the rest of the wekk.

You can download the notes (with the extra freebie bit) and powerpoint presentation here.

Just a thought today!

The appropriateness of applying Web 2.0 principles to travel and tourism is intuitive. People love to talk about their trips, share advice, photos, stories and relive the adventure, while at the same time implicitly helping their fellow travellers make the most of their travel. But can Web 2.0 philosophies be applied to real estate? For example, if you see a property that you think is a great deal to buy you certainly are not going to tell anyone, are you?

My first thoughts are that there are elements that could be investigated - for example, wiki style contributions on the best way to purchase a property, or getting builders and engineers reports etc. I have seen a number of consolidator sites - but I have never given any thought to how this content is maintained - do these sites used meta search technology in the same way as leading travel meta search sites like Kayak and Skyscanner do?

I have justed looked at the almost finalised design of a large web project I am involved in and all of a sudden a stylised map has been introduced as a means of navigation. In this particular site, the map probably works - except that I hate stylised maps on websites that are meaningless. You see so many website maps, say of where a hostel or hotel or even office is, that show the building on a map with a couple of streets around it - but they are completely meaningless. A traveller simply can not make head or toe of where the property is in relation to the city, public transport etc.

I believe that everyone should consider using something like the Google API if they are going to put a map on their website, unless of course your design can create a good looking map that is useable. Maps should be able to be zoomed, at least a relative perspective of the location.

This little rant is no less applicable to maps of countries. Say you have a couple of locations in Australia and a couple of locations in NZ. If you draw the stylised maps in scale a traveller will get the misbelief that Franz Josef and Queenstown are only a short hop - after all they are so close together on the map relative to Sydney and Brisbane (no regard for the bloody great mountains in between). Alternatively, if you don’t draw them in scale you get the reverse perception - Sydney to Cairns looks about the same distance as Wellington to Auckland.

It is not a case of under estimating the intelligence of the traveller - simply recognising that they have no comprehension of the sheer size of Australia (or in the case of local maps, the fact that Auckland is not some small flat city easily walked around) or winding and undulating nature of New Zealand roads. Maps on websites should reflect this vital travel information.

A question in today from Denis Baker at Aventure Lingusitique in Geneva - “can you have too many meta tags?”
Yes, you can have too many meta tags. The actual use of meta tags are deprecated by most search engines; and we are unsure as to their relevancy these days. There are sites with top rankings that have no meta data and sites with top rankings that do. What we are sure of is that the Google database only holds 250 characters for each meta tag - which amounts to 5 to 8 keyword phrases.

You should be targeting only that many.

An important point though is that different pages can have different keyword targets; your home page will be most generic - “study English overseas” etc., but your pages about your US schools will have different focus - “learn English in the US” - and hence variations of the met tags. Denis’ strategy of a core set, plus page specific keywords is exactly right. The core set should be quite specific and selected for search volume and competition.

I actually did some work with Denis on researching his keyword bundle. It was very interesting as his site is targeted toward French speakers and my French can get me a coffee, a beer and a lay (theoretically). What transpired though was that the language and indeed the word was irrelevant and we were able to build up a great set of keywords through following methodical steps researching search volumes and competitor numbers. Good luck with the business mate!